Patrick Larcom, a coach at CrossFit Boston, seeks to bridge the gap between the sport of rowing and the sport of fitness. That’s why he created Renegade Rowing.

Rowers arrive at 5:40 a.m. at Community Rowing Inc. to begin a day of rowing and CrossFit that ends at around 8:30 a.m.

“It’s been one of the most tremendous experiences I’ve had,” says one of the rowers. “It’s not completely easy, but it’s doable. You do it in a group of people, and you just push each other, and you get there and it’s really great. I’ve loved it.”

CrossFit has helped the novice rowers become stronger, and it’s made them more coachable, says Larcom, the man behind the WODs on CrossFit Rowing’s Facebook page.

“They’re more motivated to make a change on the water,” he explains. “They have something else that you can reference as a coach in terms of posture, body control, body awareness because of taking the time to work on their movements on the land and in the gym.”

In October 2011, Mike Hart won the Mid-Atlantic Hopper competition’s masters division at CrossFit BWI in Maryland. A year later, he’s using a walker and has difficulty speaking because of an… Continue Reading

The CrossFit Journal is a chronicle of the empirically driven, clinically tested, and community developed CrossFit program. Our mission is to provide a venue for contributing coaches, trainers, athletes, and researchers to ponder, study, debate, and define fitness and collectively advance the art and science of optimizing human performance.